‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers’

For all those people out there thinking hard about law school — the college senior, the underpaid publishing intern, the recently laid off state employee, the just home from Afghanistan Naval officer; the ABD in history, the tired, the poor, the huddled part-of-a-mass — have we got a document for you.

The document comes in the form of an academic paper, written by a law prof at Vanderbilt named Herwig Schlunk entitled, yes: ‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers.’ Schlunk’s paper attempts to answer the following question:

Is a law degree a good investment?

The paper isn’t exactly what we’d consider a fun read, packed as it is with numbers and nearly unreadable sentences like this: “Thus, perhaps the best way to analogize the relevant income stream is as a non-diversifiable equity income stream; like any other equity income stream, this stream represents the excess of all generated income over that amount of income required to repay all debts; here the “debts” soak up the entirety of the “hurdle compensation” set forth in the last table.”

Still, with a little work, the paper may well pay dividends. Schlunk uses three prototypical students (the “Also Ran,” the “Solid Performer” and the “Hot Prospect”), and concludes that each needs to earn a pretty penny pretty much upon graduation to pull down the kind of money that will ultimately justify the cost of a private-school three-year law degree. The abstract to the artcle reads:

This essay treats a legal education as an investment, and asks the question of whether, based on known costs and expected benefits, such investment should be undertaken. The inquiry will necessarily differ from one potential law student to another. But for three posited “typical students,” the investment is shown to be a bad one.

Click here, for a quick analysis of the study from Catherine Rampell at the NYT’s Economix blog. Click here, also, for a recent post from Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein on Schlunk’s article as well as a previous post on the topic from Ribstein himself.

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